Kevin M. Harper

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-science. I’m floored by the scientific advances mankind has made in understanding the world we live in during the last 150 years. But I’m equally as appalled by the sloppy science that has been produced in recent decades by the lack of a free market in scientific thought.

I’m also not an expert on the impact of government funding on the outcome of scientific achievement. But it doesn’t take an expert to see that the presence of government funding for, let’s say, the anthropomorphic view of global warming, has skewed the market for such science. It’s true that many scientists entered the field with their biases already established by the media and their university professors. But I would be shocked if there were not a fair number of scientists who are pursuing the AGM theory because to do otherwise would endanger their livelihood.

I think if scientific achievement is our primary objective, we ought to level the playing field and stop subsidizing one area of inquiry over another, or worse yet, one theory over another. This is where politics has corrupted the scientific community, because politicians can (and do) funnel grant money to their favorite scientific constituencies through pork barrel programs tacked onto legislation. This distorts the free market of ideas and means there are less resources available to the areas of research the free market would otherwise direct them to.

In fact, I’m not convinced the government should be in the science business, choosing winners and losers in science, any more than government should be choosing winners and losers in business. It is just too dangerous and costly to let decisions like this fall into the hands of politicians who love to control the purse strings of power.

Are there exceptions? Maybe. The space program, some may argue, was the result of government funded science. Or was it? Actually, I would say that the government funding of space-related scientific achievements came as the result of the national priority given to putting humans into space, and was not the cause of it.

An article in the Vancouver Sun, Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say, is a great example of how government funding of one narrow theory of science has distorted the outcome of scientific research to produce fraudulent results. In order to produce the desired results in the research, scientists (do we have to keep calling them that?) have been cherry-picking the temperature data for years. Out of hundreds of temperature data sources that could have made up the data set for northerly latitudes, the biased AGM crowd has been using one. That’s right, just one.

It’s time to face the fact that few, if any, scientific advances in the history of mankind have been the result of politicians funneling money to a particular grant program, particularly when the grant programs favor only one particular theory. If we can send a message to Washington to start killing some heretofore sacred cows in the so-called scientific community, I think we’ll end up with a lot more momentous achievements in science.

Are there too many scientists to support such a paradigm shift in how we do science? Yes and no. My bet is that a lot of dead wood needs to be trimmed from the payrolls of science, but that there is a huge market waiting to be made for dedicated scientists that have their ear to the ground for useful science that will actually change lives and produce measurable achievements in the history of humankind.

The scientists who are used to sucking up to political benefactors for funding will probably not make it–nor should they. If their research is actually useful, someone will step forward to pay for it. But when government offers to pay for it (read “you and me”), we just end up with inefficiently allocated funding for the research that really does need to take place.